


Remembering

by 13thSyndicate



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Feelings, Feels, Gen, Lea talks about Roxas, Post-KH3D, Sora learns about Roxas, friendships, sea salt trio
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-13 23:40:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11195886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13thSyndicate/pseuds/13thSyndicate
Summary: Before he leaves for Olympus Colisem, Sora has just a few things he wants to ask Lea. Lea agrees.





	Remembering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ProPinkist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProPinkist/gifts).



"Hey...! Hey, wait... Axe... I mean, Lea..!"

The redhead frowned, turning around at the sound of his name, the flash of surprise still awkwardly uncomfortable in his chest. he paused on the grass, halfway between one stride and the next, and caught the sight of a certain spiky-haired Somebody running towards him. Sora stopped, bent over, taking deep breaths as though he'd been running down the tower stairs, all however-many-of-them-they-kept-changing there were, in order to catch him.

Maybe he had.

"Don't you have somewhere to be?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. The question didn't come from a malicious place - he was honestly curious. "Thought you were being sent to train with golden boy on Olympus Coliseum."

"Well, y-yeah, but.... I had something important to ask you, first." He paused, frowning up at the much-taller redhead, folding his arms behind his head as his gaze slid away off into the sunset. "Can we go someplace private to talk? LIke... I dunno.... I feel like a clock tower, but.... I don't know why."

Lea looked at the smaller boy, very carefully, but stayed silent.

"I... wanted to ask about... him. You know... Roxas." He dropped his eyes to the ground, his hands slipping into his pocket. "You were.... you were best friends, right...?"

"Y-yeah," Lea replied, and as much as dull surprise had been an awkward reminder that emotions were new to him again, the choked-up feeling in his throat and chest were achingly familiar even as they felt ten times stronger now that the heart that was breaking was beating physically in his chest. "The... the three of us were always together." He cleared his throat. "I mean the two of us. You weren't there or anything... 'cept maybe in spirit, Nobodies and all that..."

There was a puzzled frown on Sora's face, but he wasn't looking - he was staring out into the sunset and rubbing the back of his head in a nervous habit that reminded hm too much of good times and bad for the comfort of his newly-beating, fragile human heart.

He drew in a deep breath and composed the smiling mask across his face. One thing about being an ex-nobody – knowing what it feels like to feel nothing makes it pretty easy to pretend to feel that way again. To put on a smile you don’t feel, to act and put on a show. Maybe, when all this Keyblade nonsense was over, and everything was back where it belonged, he’d go make a killing in the theater or something. Right.

In the words of the former number two, as if.

“So you want to know about Roxas, then?” he asked, looking down at Sora’s mixed expression. “Why the sudden interest?”

Sora’s grin was sudden and playful. Lea could almost remember what it was like to be that open with his emotions, back when every new feeling didn’t feel tender and raw and precious, but was something taken for granted. _Is this just an adult thing?_ he had to ask himself. _Is it because I’m older than him that I’m not like that anymore? Or is it really just because it’s been so long?_

“Can’t tell you that!” Sora said, giving him a cheeky grin, hands on hips. Then he dropped into a more neutral stance, losing the cockiness. “Well, not just that. He’s a part of me, right?” He put a hand on his heart. “I feel like… I owe it to him. To know. His memories…. They’re in me, and I can feel them sometimes… like the clock tower – I’m pretty sure that came from him. But they’re not my memories or anything – it’s not like I can just remember. You knew him best out of anyone, so…” He shrugged. “I understand… if it hurts… I just… I need to know. So please tell me.”

Sora’s voice and face were serious as he spoke, not quite begging but definitely pleading, and Lea ssighed, nodding with a thin, bittersweet smile, letting some of his own feelings come through.

“Alright,” he said, holding out a hand and reaching for that other power inside him, the polar opposite of what he touched to call the Keyblade he still couldn’t believe he had acquired. Darkness bloomed at his fingertips, the Way through Nothingness opening before him.  “But you’ve gotta buy me ice cream, got it?”

It was so easy to reach Twilight Town through the dark corridors. The world really did lay between light and dark, and the journey through the portal took no time at all. A few minutes of Sora haggling with an ice cream vendor and a hefty climb up to the top of a clock tower later, and all of Twilight Town lay at their feet.

He couldn’t help but notice that Sora didn’t quite sit like Roxas did – he leaned back, taking up space, bracing a foot on the short wall in front of him, rather than hunched over, staring out across the city. But that was only to be expected, really – unlike himself and Axel, Sora and Roxas really weren’t the same person. It wasn’t just about memories, like he’d thought before, it was something else. Something about heart.

He didn’t even wait for Sora to ask a question (and he was pretty sure Sora was waiting for him, anyway) before he launched into a story. It was a dumb story. It was a stupid story. It was a story about Roxas’ first days, about how much of a zombie he was, about how he didn’t know what ice cream or cake or anything was. How he had to have his hand held.

He told Sora about how he told Roxas why the sunset was red – Sora frowned, like he was half-remembering something, but he didn’t know the answer. Lea didn’t push.

Sora did have a lot of questions, though, about other things. What was the organization like? What did Roxas do? Did they really just go around collecting hearts and being evil all day? (He didn’t say it like that, but his guilty look right afterwards told Lea that’s what he meant). Lea struggled to put it into words – what it was like to work for the Organization, what it was like to have no heart. What it was like to be chosen to work with the one person who could make their dreams reality. Sora watched, and took it in, and didn’t judge – for some reason, that helped. Lea knew the kid didn’t approve of what they did. Hell, _Lea_ didn’t approve of some of the thigns they did. But Sora never said a word.

He finished a story – a story about being on a mission with another member, though which one he couldn’t quite recall, a story about somebody being sick and Roxas working double to cover them (though that was odd, because Nobody’s didn’t get sick – it was magical in nature, he thought to himself, frowning as he tried to dredge up the details, had to be) – and Sora frowned to himself.

“He was a good person,” he said, and his voice was filled with the iron resolve Lea was all too familiar with. It was the resolve that reminded him most of Roxas – and the goodness. They were goody-two-shoes,t he both of them, and it was gonna get them killed.

“Yeah,” he agreed, biting off a chunk of ice cream, savoring the salty-sweet, cold flavor as it melted across his tongue and sld down his throat. “Yeah he was.”

“He… really didn’t deserve any of that,” Sora decided. “If it weren’t for me getting my memories taken… Riku told me about that… he wouldn’t have had to go back to me, would he? He was his own person. It’s what he wanted more than anything, I can feel it.”

“Yeah, well,” Lea said, thinking back to a time when his – Axel’s - lack of heartbeat kept him awake at night, when he could feel nothingness swelling inside of him, chipping away not at the edges but at  the filling, until sometimes he felt like nothing more than giving up, “Nobodies don’t really have a choice.”

“Roxas wasn’t really a Nobody, was he?” Sora asked, and he couldn’t find it in himself to argue the point.

They sat there in silence for a long time, finishing their ice creams before they melted, before he broke the silence.

“There’s a reason he reminded me a lot of you,” he said, looking over at Sora. “More than just the being-your-nobody thing. He was always thinking of other people. It’s kinda strange, in a Nobody. There’s just… no reward, for being selfless, to one of us… one of them,” he corrected himself. “Nothing motivates you to help others. You can’t pity – you can’t regret. You have to make a conscious choice to care about other people. Roxas cared. I mean, Lexaeus was kinda like that, when he was around. He did stuff for other people, played the good big brother. It was a conscious thing for him, though.He decided to do it because when he had a heart, he wanted to still feel like he had nothing to regret. He wanted to live by the code he’d lived by as a Somebody, and boy, did he ever manage.” He shook his head. “But it wasn’t like that for Roxas. It was like every attack on somebody else was personally on him. He stood up for other people. When people picked on… on somebody, he was right there. It’s every Nobody for himself, or it was, but Roxas was for everybody.”

He chuckled. “Honestly. It’s one of the reasons we were friends. I had to look out for the kid, I thought, but he just turned around and turned out to be looking after me instead.”

Sora frowned, thinking for a moment, staring off into the sunset with his hands behind his head.

“That doesn’t sound very selfish to me,” he pointed out, and Lea gave him a confused look.

“Huh?”

“Well, I mean… you looked out for Roxas, right?” Sora looked at him, blue eyes suddenly piercing. “That means you weren’t just thinking of yourself. Maybe selflessness wasn’t something that unusual after all. Or maybe it was, but you weren’t always selfish.”

“Sora, I kidnapped your girlfriend because I thought it’d make you so mad you’d turn back into Roxas again,” he pointed out. “That’s not exactly the paragon of selflessness, right there.”

“Yeah, but you let her go again, right?”

He blinked at Sora, who grinned.

“I mean, you did. Right before Saix kidnapped her back – you said that. Or maybe you didn’t, I don’t remember, but you seemed pretty upset that Saix had her and you definitely wanted me to get her back. You wouldn’t do that if you didn’t feel guilty about taking her in the first place.” He shook his head. “While I was in the dream world, I was told that Nobodies start growing hearts after a while.  It makes sense that being friends with Roxas was growing your heart. I’ve seen it happen before.”

Sora looked… smug, as he turned back towards Twilight Town, leaning back against the clock tower.

“And Roxas was friends with you. I can feel that. So I’m pretty sure Roxas… had some kind of heart, too. Along with all the other Organization members. Or at least some of them. And if you’re back, they’re back… so Roxas should be able to come back too, right?”

He stared at the young Keyblade wielder with his unflinching gaze and casual way of stating the impossible with something like disbelief. Was he…? Did he just imply…?

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” he asked in disbelief, and Sora nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “There are people who need saving – and I’m going to save them all. Not just some of them. Not just the people people think are people and people think should be saved. Everyone. I want to know more about Roxas because I want to be friends with him someday. I want to learn everything I can about him because he was part of me for so long, and I took so much away from him. I owe it to him to be that.”  
  
He put his hand over his heart while Lea watched, and felt his own heart thud against the walls of his chest, not uncomfortably, but with warmth, a feeling prickling its way, loudly, unignorably, into his heart. It was a little bittersweet, a little hopeful. He didn’t have any friends left, he thought, but… maybe…

“You’re going to bring him back.”

“I’m going to bring them both back,” Sora said.

Lea wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but a small, half-forgotten part of him, shoved his heart into his throat in anticipation.

_Both._

“I’ll help you,” he promised. “I told them I’d always be there to bring them back. No way am I letting you do it by yourself.”

Sora pushed himself to his feet, popsicle stick dangling, forgotten, in his hand. For a moment, for just a moment, he wasn’t himself – something was overlaid against him, a mirage, maybe, from the setting sun. A head of spiky blonde hair; a checkered jacket. Sora tilted his head to catch the light, and the image shifted – for just a moment, an incredibly brief moment, a black-haired girl, wearing the Cloak, stood in his place.

Then it was over, and Sora was reaching down to help him up.

“The more friends the merrier, right?” he asked, and Lea didn’t trust himself to speak as he accepted the help to his full height. He nodded.

He portaled them directly back to Yen Sid’s tower. Sora rejoined with Donald and Goofy, they got in their ship, they sailed away.

Lea glanced down at the stick in his hands – _Winner_ – and closed his eyes, and tried to hold back the flood of conflicting emotions, and desperately clawed at his retreating memories for the meaning behind the name _Xion._

**Author's Note:**

> I had such a good idea for this fic starting out and I feel like it fell apart at the end... written as a request for, and as a result of what-iffing with, ProPinkist.
> 
> I have feels about Lea and feelings and I don't think I did them any sort of justice, so I will probably write more.


End file.
